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Monday, March 24, 2008

Veggie-packed tofu stir-fry...

Thanks for the notes about my finger! It looks like things are healing well, although the occasional bump quickly reminds me of what happened. I've been using those single "finger cots" so I can continue to cook and bake without irritating the wound.

It certainly helped when I was chopping up the red bell pepper for tonight's Spicy Stir-Fried Tofu with Snow Peas, Peanut Butter and Broccoli as I'm sure it would have been quite painful if any of the juice found its way to the cut. The original recipe called for mushrooms, but we decided to swap those for broccoli to make Jeff happy. I have more luck using those fungi when he can't see them!

You'll need a package of extrafirm tofu for this -we drained away the water and cut the chunk of tofu into cubes. We wanted to get as much excess liquid out from them as we could, so the cubes were scattered onto a few paper towels, followed up by a couple more on top. We then placed a heavy plate on top - 5 minutes or so of this should be sufficient, but we left it for about 15 minutes as I was prepping the rest of the ingredients.

With the extra moisture pressed out, the cubes browned in a bit of oil fairly quick. We scooped the golden tofu onto a plate and tossed in a healthy amount of trimmed snow peas, a chopped red bell pepper, mild green onions and a couple cloves worth of minced garlic. A bit of water is also added to help the cooking process along. When the snow peas were almost cooked through, the broccoli florets were added and left to cook just until they were bright green and crisp-tender. This mixture is fairly dry at this point, so to sauce things up, a combination of tamari (a thicker, dark soy sauce), creamy peanut butter, cornstarch and a couple dashes of Sriracha are whisked together to kick up the heat. Fairly light as is, we served this veggie-loaded, peanutty stir-fry over a bed of brown basmati rice.

That looks great! Have you ever tried freezing tofu? It totally changes the texture once you thaw it--it makes it much chewier and it really absorbs the flavors/marinade a lot better...you should try it sometime! Good call on pressing the tofu in this recipe--I am sure that made the dish even better!